Donald Trump's human shield: Ivanka, the dutiful daughter, keeps playing her part

By Margaret Carlson

Aug 12, 2018 | 5:00 AM

Speaking to Mike Allen of Axios. (Alex Wong /)

Comedians Amy Schumer and Chelsea Handler are organizing the women Ivanka Trump follows on Instagram to flood her feed. It's no laughing matter. They're reminding her that the abuse of children at the border continues, that she's been no help, and criticized her for her cluelessness when she finally broke her silence during an interview last week.

The form post begins, "Dear Ivanka, you follow me on social media. You said family separation was a 'low point' for you. The 'low point' is for separated families. You spoke in past tense. The crisis is ongoing."

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Their critique went on to take the outrages one by one: the 400 parents deported without their children (it's 386 as of Friday), the claims that one child died after leaving detention, of others drugged, sexually abused and made to clean toilets by private contractors making a fortune off kids in cages.

As of Thursday, they could have added the administration trying to deport another mother and child out from under the nose of the federal judge working against great odds to save an unknown number of children from becoming orphans. She ordered that the plane turn around mid-air. A lawyer representing the White House hemmed and hawed but, under threat of the administration being held in contempt of court, he agreed.

There have been other times when Ivanka has failed to live up to her promise — on the Muslim travel ban, on Charlottesville, on the United States dropping out of the Paris climate accords. But nothing has exposed her failure to be "a force for good" which she proclaimed to justify flouting anti-nepotism laws and moving into the West Wing, like the crisis at the border.

And what makes the Instagram moment important is that this harsh criticism isn't coming from the masses of people who follow Ivanka but those worthy souls she's chosen to follow, whose opinion she presumably cares about and whose acceptance she presumably wants when she returns to civilian life on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

The question is a pertinent one: Would the President still be acting so inhumanely if his humane daughter were alive doing what she said she was coming to Washington to do? You certainly don't uproot your family just to pass paid parental leave.

Ivanka was always the hope of moderates who thought she might get the casino boss and real estate baron to give up his birther base and pivot to being presidential.

Now more than ever. There's no one else. Chief of staff Gen. John Kelly has checked out, beaten down, warming a chair but not filling it. Members of Congress are more worried about the next election than the republic. The judiciary is now poised to rubber stamp whatever Trump wants thanks to Justice Anthony Kennedy's timely retirement to make way for one of his clerks.

Even before her latest failure, Ivanka had been busier getting trademarks and avoiding tariffs on her handbags and scarves, doing well while not doing good.

One of the times she did step up may partly explain why we were wrong to ever think that she might be a brake on the occupant of the Oval Office. After Ivanka declared there was a "special place in hell" for credibly accused pederast Roy Moore, her father reportedly got furious at her. He also kept supporting the pederast.

It's enough to discourage anyone. Trump's displeasure is hard on a daughter who's always struggled to please him. Even as his playboy life forced the teenager to dodge paparazzi asking whether her father's sex with Marla Maples was the best he ever had, she worried over whether she would get to keep the name Trump after their divorce, a valid concern given that she wasn't a building or a steak.

She kept it, for better and worse, and she's developed a maddening M.O. to cope with being a Trump that's on full display amid the mayhem at the border.

She leaks to sympathetic reporters that she's upset and conveying that behind the scenes. He then mentions that she is, in fact, concerned as the womenfolk will be from time to time.

Trump told the House Republican Conference that Ivanka came to him and said "Daddy, what are we doing about this?" according to the New York Times' Maggie Haberman. Afterwards, under pressure from Republican menfolk who've found their spines, as horrifying pictures of crying babies and panicked mothers were blanketing the airwaves, he changed his policy with an unnecessary executive order in which he ordered himself to change his own policy, she praised him in a coy tweet, as if they only communicate in 144 characters.

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"Thank you @POTUS for taking critical action ending family separation at our border." If there was any danger she ever got on her father's bad side, she then moved back to his good one by reiterating Trump's blame-shifting nearly word-for-word: She urged Congress to "find a lasting solution that is consistent with our shared values."

Remember: The President created the exact humanitarian crisis he later decided to fix.

What the Instagram critique of the interview Ivanka gave last week overlooked was the worst part of it. It didn't get much coverage, but in the second part of her answer, she reverted to a defense of her father's policy.

Invoking her mother, Ivana, she praised her for entering the country legally in much the same way Trump lauds his in-laws from Slovenia who became citizens on Thursday — not mentioning that they took advantage of the very chain migration Trump hates.

Then she said "We have to be very careful about incentivizing behavior that puts children at risk of being trafficked, at risk of entering this country with coyotes or making an incredibly dangerous journey alone."

Of course, the children taken didn't come alone. And of course, her remark is nothing more than a version of the deterrence policy that created this disaster in the first place. Life may be cruel in lawless Honduras where murderous gangs will conscript and kill your child, but come here seeking legal asylum, and you will lose your child immediately. And, perhaps, forever.

And note that Ivanka said nothing until her father, under pressure from other quarters, changed his policy. The whole interview was a planned exercise in damage control, part of the reset of her image being choreographed by the new communications shop headed by Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who oversaw payments of a hundred million dollars to sexual abusers.

Oddly enough, the reluctant First Lady, Melania, has done more than Ivanka, and one White House adviser suggests this plays some part in Ivanka holding back.

The two have a complicated air-kiss relationship, cool but cordial. Melania calls her stepchildren "friends." Ivanka welcomes the spotlight; Melania does not.

They are both good mothers with skincare product lines, but Melania spends more time shuttling Barron to and from her parents' house and school an hour away than she does in the White House or socializing at the Trump Hotel.

First Ladies traditionally work to soften their husband's hard edges, and Melania's efforts are peculiar: ending cyberbullying, issuing a statement that she will watch the TV channels she chooses, taking off to the border but enigmatically, with a jacket that famously bore the legend, "I Really Don't Care, Do U?" subject to more interpretations than the Torah.

She did her own damage control for her husband when she corrected his nasty tweet that LeBron James was stupid. There was an Ohio special election coming up.

Despite her mixed message, Ivanka was applauded for her performance, like the storied dog standing on its hind legs: It's not that it was done well, but that it was done at all. Finally, she was speaking up, even if it was primarily to ask us to feel her pain and subtly support her father.

The whole interview, designed to break her silence with dignity, shows why counting on Ivanka to be the conscience of the White House is like looking for a day from her father without any lies. A child, no matter how old, is never old enough to be the parent until the parent is incapacitated. Despite the title of Omarosa's new book, "Unhinged," we aren't there yet.

As for speaking as if the crisis is over, Ivanka has a lot of company. There are so many scandals at any one time, a crisis as dire as hundreds of children being forcibly taken away moves off the front page to accommodate new shockers: Republican Congressman Chris Collins' arrest for insider trading, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross' alleged $123 million con on various business partners, Paul Manafort's pocket-stuffing frauds and the ostrich coat they bought.

In fairness to Ivanka, her father's been a lot worse than most people thought, and she's been ignored more than she imagined. Yet she's digging in for the duration, searching for a new house (the mansion in Kalorama, with almost no yard, is not child-friendly) and giving up, finally, her conflicted handbag and fragrance business, although not before she and her husband brought in $82 million last year.

The sorry-not-sorry interview is part of an image reset. Stories about the New Ivanka are being shopped to various women's magazines and friendly anchors.

After Republicans' dismal, nail-biting performance in Tuesday's primary elections, Ivanka will be crucial as November approaches. She's being deployed to woo suburban women in places where her father dare not show his face.

She did this well during 2017, the Trump who wasn't a registered Republican, appealing to women in key counties while wearing perfect working-women clothing from her own collection.She also stood by her father after a dozen women emerged to accuse him of sexual harassment and gazed adoringly as if she didn't hear her father boasting about groping women on the "Access Hollywood" tapes.

This helped the most misogynistic candidate to ever run for the presidency win the vote of 53% of white women — which is the real stat that feeds Donald's routine lie that he won the women's vote. (Isn't it easy to forget there are women who aren't white?)

We'll see whether Ivanka has reset her image enough to drag Republicans across the finish line and hold on to their majorities. Women will have to believe her and not what they've seen. Presidents have lost children in war, but none has purposefully ripped them from their parents because they deserved it for daring to seek a better life on our shores.